The present disclosure generally relates to cardiac diagnostics, and more particularly, to systems methods and computer products for automatically extracting cardiac calcifications and obtaining a better centerline in the tracking.
Most cardiac diagnostics include vascular analysis and coronary stenosis analysis. The cardiac calcifications obstruct the visualization of the lumen of the coronaries. A display of the lumen without the calcifications helps the diagnosis (mode ON/OFF). A good lumen extraction and visualization would be possible if there exists perfect detection of the centerline (centerline in the lumen). However, current techniques tend to detect the centerline inside the cardiac calcifications instead of the actual center of the lumen. Therefore, the lumen visualization is upset and the stenosis measurement is not reliable if the user performs no edition of the lumen centerline or contours. Current methods also detect the centerline of the vessel and provide lumen and reformatted views to help the reading. The stenosis measurements (diameter, length) also depend on the reliability of lumen volume. In addition, a realistic display of the inside of the vessel helps the diagnosis.